Adapt, or Die
Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Author’s Corner by ECLOGUE PRESS! This weekly digest highlights Substack posts with a common theme from the previous week that we found edifying for the sci-fi and fantasy author. Posts we feature here run the entire gamut from ideation to publication and everything around and in-between.
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“Join, or Die” (attr. Benjamin Franklin, 1754) — the earliest political cartoon to depict the future United States in a union together. Indie authors and presses need to do the same!
Traditional Publishers Can’t Adapt Like Indie Can
Traditional publishing is in peril. This is no news for many of us on Substack, but Steve Kelsey cuts straight to the heart of the issue: he reports that just 5% of tradpub’s titles turn a profit. That’s not just an unsustainable business model. It’s a completely irrational one. Steve’s novel contribution to the problem is an alternative business model that could be much more profitable for traditional publishers, not to mention better for most readers and authors too: a model that puts bestselling titles ahead of big advances on celebrity names. He even includes the framework for a three-year pilot program that any of the Big Five could implement.
But adapting to the new bookselling ecosystem measured in Kindle page reads rather than Nielsen BookScan may be impossible for these dinosaurs. All the money in the world can’t buy off inflexible institutional inertia. The only ones who have both the willingness and flexibility to cater to what the readers actually want where the readers actually want to read it are small publishers, both small presses like ECLOGUE PRESS and self-publishing authors. Steve’s principle of adaptive scaling—spending time and money on the titles that actually sell—may never work for tradpub, but it can be an excellent operating principle for any small press or author to remember when deciding where best to spend their limited resources.
Adapting to the New Amazon Algorithm
Self-publishing authors and small presses are facing new challenges this week too: Fandom Pulse has notified us that Amazon KDP has changed its algorithm for bestseller rankings. The change includes reducing the frequency of ranking updates from once every hour to just once every day. This might upend years of advice to authors that urged focusing all promotional efforts for new releases on launch week. The longer update frequency appears to be ranking consistent performers over those with large spikes in sales upon release.
Together with author Robert Peecher, who has released several westerns on Amazon, this post explores the deeper implications of this change: namely, that older titles are seeing upticks in sales at the expense of new ones. That might mean that promotional efforts need to continue much longer post-launch, with the upshot that books can continue to sell well for much longer too. However, there’s no hard data yet on how this is affecting Kindle sales and page reads more broadly—an important consideration for those of us concerned about whether this curtails or enables more AI-generated slop to rise to the top rankings on Kindle. Authors and presses preparing for their next release on KDP, like us here at ECLOGUE PRESS, should take notice and adapt their promotional strategy accordingly!
Adaptation Doesn’t Mean Conformity
There’s more ways to adapt to today’s readers than just tuning your promotions for Amazon’s latest algorithm changes. Readers are always looking for novelty, and sometimes novelty means returning to older, fuller forms that don’t rely on cheap tricks and tropes. Enter LG McCary, acquisitions editor at Quill & Flame Publishing’s new horror imprint Obsidian:
Obsidian publishes spine-tingling science fiction, horror, and fantasy that redeems the dark. The imprint is intended to fill a gap in the market for readers who love creepy stories but want to avoid sexual content, excessive language, and extreme gore.
Aiming for “chills without the nausea”, Obsidian seems like a perfect fit for stories that want to stand apart in the horror genre, which is currently oversaturated with low-effort works that need the shock of graphic sex, gore, and violence to make up for the emptiness of their shadows and the hollowness of their evils.
Submissions for Obsidian open tomorrow on July 1 and run through July 31. If you’ve got sci-fi or fantasy horror that helps redeem the darkness and reclaim the horror genre from cheap exploitation, take a look at their submission guidelines now!
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